Database systems and search and retrieval from such databases are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,911,139 to Jain et al. describes a visual image database search engine which allows for different schema. A schema is a specific collection of primitives to be processed and a corresponding feature vector is used for similarity scoring. In particular, a system and method for content-based search and retrieval of visual objects computes a distance between two feature vectors in a comparison process to generate a similarity score.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,778,995 to Gallivan describes a system and method for efficiently generating cluster groupings in a multi-dimensional concept space. A plurality of terms is extracted from documents of a collection of stored, unstructured documents. A concept space is built over the collection and terms correlated between documents such that a vector may be mapped for each correlated term. Referring to FIG. 14 of the '995 patent, a cluster is populated with documents having vector differences falling within a predetermined variance such that a view may be generated of overlapping clusters.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,127,372 to Boysworth describes an improved regression-based qualitative analysis algorithm when a mixture, not in a library of spectra, and being an “unknown” is subjected to regression analysis of “peaks” in a residual error computed between an estimated spectrum and a measured spectrum. The process is repeated using information from a retro-regression.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,236,971 to Shatdal et al. describes a method and system for deriving data through interpolation in a database system. A parallel database system has plural processing units capable of performing interpolation of data in parallel.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,318,053 to Cha et al. describes an indexing system and method for nearest neighbor searches in high dimensional databases using vectors representing objects in n-dimensional space and local polar coordinates for vectors such that a query data vector is requested to find “k” nearest neighbors to the query vector of the vectors in the n-dimensional space.
Haining, “Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis in a Geographic Information System,” The Statistician 47, Part 3, 457-469 (1998) describes a software system involving the exploratory spatial data analysis features of the ARC/INFO geographical information system and identifies spatial patterns of geographic locations.
Other systems and database technologies are known which incorporate multivariate statistical analysis and, in particular, principal component analysis, from patent and non-patent literature and other technologies which utilize a geographic information system (GIS).